Steve Moseley

With January you can sometimes ride a little wave of leftover holiday glow to get you through. March is of little use, but at least the promise of Easter lies on the calendar’s next page.

But what in the h-e-double-toothpicks are we supposed to do with February, that great dead zone that languishes between?

As for me, I can find at least a little something to recommend most months. For example any month the lakes aren’t frozen and the fish are biting at least a little is mostly safe from scorn despite what other bad behavior it manifests.

Out here in New-Brass-Key we have hail and tornadoes and blinding snowstorms and ice that builds up on power lines which the raging wind swings so high and hard they snap miles of poles.

But even when that happens, if fishing prospects remain decent I am inclined to give that month the benefit of the doubt.

Good Wife Norma and I are especially enamored of fall, just as we were when we, too, lived in greater metropolitan Powell. Fall is our preferred season to come back, which is just what we plan to do in the first half of September 2023.

Fall up the North Fork, over the Chief Joseph and Beartooth highways and of course the park is as good as it gets for us.

Spring is wake-up time for all the flora and fauna — whether in the mountains or upon this lifeless and barren plain — so those months are excused from suffering my ire, too.

Thanksgiving and Christmas with family save November and December from the ridicule they would otherwise suffer for their often inhospitable weather, so for that and only that we’ll issue those 62 days a soft pass.

The worst of the hot months have no comparison between Wyoming and Nebraska. Even when you get serious heat it cools right down almost the moment the sun gets to Heart Mountain. Plus, you lucky folks suffer no humidity at all.

Not so hard by the banks of the Missouri River where we find ourselves presently marooned. In the worst of it, temps of 100 degrees or more don’t fall below 80 or 85 even in deepest night. Likewise, the humidity is as insufferable at noon as at midnight. You’d think a snorkel would be required just to breathe in 90% humidity, but by some miracle it’s not.

July and August are not favorites because of the aforementioned blast furnace and wilting humidity, too often compounded by those rampaging tornadoes, corn-field-flattening straight winds, lightning, thunder, gully-washers of rain though infrequent in this draught, or roof-shredding hail. (Exhibit A: This very year a single night of pounding hail driven by devil wind took out our roof, all the gutters and downspouts, our garden shed, nearly every one of GWN’s beloved flowers, garden decorations and destroyed the steel siding on two sides of our home all to the tune of $30,000 give or take in damage.)

Yet the fish can still be had for those anglers clever enough to find them in the depths and jolt them from their dog days lethargy into nibbling a worm, chunk of cheese or perhaps a length of hot dog. So July and August are tolerated too, if grudgingly.

Which covers just about every month save February, which has Valentine’s Day of course. However, by a monumental double standard of injustice its benefit accrues only to the ladies. Therefore that particular holiday remains of little consequence to us males of the species … unless we drop the ball.

Let Valentine’s Day drift by without meeting her expectations, fellas, and you might not live to see the Ides of March.